Enter the Honda Fit EV

I've leased a 2013 Honda Fit EV.

I'm not really one for "green" thinking. I've said more than once that I think that most of the things that are supposed to be good for the planet are either foolishly costly or ineffective or both. But if you find a way to save me a dollar, you have my attention.

I've talked about this a bit of Facebook, but I think it's worth adding a bit here about the math.

A gallon of gasoline has 33.4 kW-hr of energy in it.

Silicon Valley Power rates are 8.877¢ per kW-hr for the first 300 kW-hr and 10.205¢ for kW-hrs after that. 300 kW-hr isn't a lot, so let's assume the worst and say that it's the 10.205 rate. If you were to magically turn electricity into gasoline at 100% efficiency, you'd be able to gas up that way for $3.41 per gallon. That's not such a big difference, but it is a pretty good deal. But still, the cost of the energy isn't where the big difference is.

Gasoline car efficiency is traditionally measured in miles per gallon. EVs are measured in either miles per kW-hr or kW-hr per 100 miles. The EPA rates the Fit EV as a combined city/hwy of 29 kW-hr/100mi, or 3.44 mi/kW-hr. Convert that into mpg and you get about 115 MPGe.

Despite that, the Fit EV is almost a muscle car in its ability to launch itself off the line. I'd love to take a day off some day to make a trip up to Sonoma to try the quarter mile (of course, it means stopping in San Francisco to charge up... It's just always an issue). I'm pretty confident it could turn in a sub-15 second time. I'm an unapologetic lead-foot and this car is a downright joy to drive. If you put it in "sport" mode, you get a full 123 horsepower and a healthy 189 ft-lb of torque. That's only a little less than Volkswagen's TDI engine (140 hp and 256 ft-lb of torque, but the torque curve of a diesel engine is far narrower than an electric motor).

Though using electricity is a very efficient way to obtain motive power, it's horrendously slow to deliver it and difficult to store. The 20 kW-hr battery represents the energy in less than 2/3 of a single gallon of gasoline and weighs more than 800 pounds. By contrast, an 18 gallon gasoline tank is 600 kW-hr. If I had a 600 kW-hr battery, I'd be able to go almost 2000 miles between charges.

But even that isn't the big issue. The charger built-in to the car is rated at 6.6 kW. In other words, 6.6 kW-hr per hour. So it takes 3 hours to charge completely from empty. Recharging the mythical 600 kW-hr battery above at that rate would take 90 hours - almost 4 days. Even the CHAdeMO HVDC chargers they have now are 62.5 kW - 10 times faster (though it should be noted that the Fit EV isn't equipped with a CHAdeMO port, and frequent use of high-power charging will decrease battery life long term). But those require 3 phase 480v power feeds. My house has a 200A @ 240V service panel - that's only 48 kW, and that's my whose house.

With these sorts of limitations, EVs are reasonable "second cars." But you can't seriously consider taking one on a road trip. No, not even a Tesla. Tesla's strategy is to deploy so-called "supercharger" stations at strategic locations to enable road trips. They have one at Harris Ranch, one in Bakersfield, as well as in Los Angeles.

I'm sure Elon Musk has thought about this longer than I. But I think this strategy is misplaced for a couple of reasons. Let's use my occasional trips to San Diego as the basis for my argument. The trip is 450 miles and takes a total driving time of about 7 hours. It takes longer than that for the trip because of refueling stops (for the car and the driver). In a gasoline car, I've been known to make it in 8 hours or less. Refueling takes about 15 minutes.

The range of a model S is not particularly relevant unless it doesn't make it between Supercharger stations or unless it can "skip" one (no way). Tesla knows this and placed them strategically along I-5. They say they can charge about half way in half an hour. But half a charge won't get you to the next station.

This strategy will only work if the cars stay rare, which clearly is the opposite of Tesla's goal of selling cars (duh). But setting that aside, the trip to San Diego will require 3 intermediate stops for refueling, which will take around an hour each. So the 8 hour trip is now 11 hours.

No. It's just not going to work.

The only solution to this conundrum is temporary auxiliary power provisioning for long trips. This means one of three things:

1. Liquid fuel powered pusher trailers
2. Liquid fuel powered generator trailers
3. Swappable battery pack trailers

Petroleum powered pusher trailers are actually a fairly mature idea. Many tinkerers out there have taken a front-wheel drive vehicle, chopped off the back half, locked the steering, added a trailer hitch and attached it to an EV.By contrast, the idea of using an engine and generator to power the car isn't so great. Scooting down the highway, the car requires something like 20-30 kW just to maintain highway speed. A 20 kW generator is going to be one heck of a trailer. Still, it has been done before (note, however, that the EV hauling this monster is an SUV).

I think the battery pack trailer has the best long-term prospects. Tesla could replace their supercharger stations with a trailer exchange station. Trading out trailers would take probably less time than filling the tank of a conventional car would. The problem there is that 40 kW-hr of battery weighs a good 800 pounds. That's bound to have an impact on the car's performance. Still, 3 100 mile battery swaps, plus the car's internal 150 mile range (remember, we're talking about a Tesla model S) is the 450 miles of the benchmark trip.

However you decide to provision auxiliary power, I think having it be available for temporary rental for road trips is the way to go. If the APU is petroleum (or methanol) powered, the agency renting it will be on the hook for proper maintenance of the emissions controls. Additionally, a rental fleet can be turned over more quickly as technology improves.

MikroTik RouterBoard: the ultimate networking swiss army knife

I've been on the hunt for a while now for a better router for the house. What I've wanted was the perfect marriage of cost, customizability, utility and ease of use. The features I've needed:

1. Basic NAT and Firewall with uPnP or NAT-PMP
2. DHCP client on WAN port, DHCP server on inside network
3. IPv6
4. Dynamic DNS
5. Uplink bandwidth prioritization / QoS

The closest I have come up to now has been the AirPort Extreme. It does most of what is on that list, but has some holes, particularly in its (lack of) ability to do QoS, and its limited DDNS implementation. It also lacks any sort of VPN server, but I'd been able to work around that with a combination of one internal machine with a DHCP reservation and an SSH port forwarding and/or MobileMe's "Back To My Mac" functionality.

But a few weeks ago, I discovered MikroTik.

My first product of theirs that I tried was their RB250GS. I bought it because I needed a switch with a tap port, and that was the cheapest switch I could find that did it. And I was happy with its performance and functionality. But that little introduction to their product line also brought me an introduction to their RB450G board, which intrigued me greatly.

It's a box with a CPU, 5 gigabit Ethernet ports, a serial port and a beeper. It runs a proprietary Linux distribution called RouterOS. Combined with a Windows (Windows, yes, but it runs perfectly under WINE) management UI, it's the swiss army knife of routers. Almost as good as a Cisco box costing hundreds (perhaps thousands) of dollars more.

I can hear a lot of you out there saying, "why not just install DD-WRT on a Linksys or Netgear router?" And indeed - that was what I thought I would wind up doing. And it may have wound up being every bit as capable as what I have. But the difference here is that the RouterOS that it comes with is every bit as capable, but the firmware is actually supported by the manufacturer - it's not as if you bought a Honda because you intend to remove the power-train and drop it onto a nitro funny-car chassis. It's certainly something that's done, but it's generally a lot more trouble than it's worth.

Now, MikroTik's products are not for everyone. For one thing, they come as bare boards. You have to actually pay extra (in most cases - depending on the reseller) for a chassis and power supply. They're also pretty poorly documented. If you want to play with them, you're going to have to know what you want, know what you're talking about, and do some googling around to figure out how to get it done.

But after a couple of days of work, I have a box that does everything I want it to do. It has one port dedicated to being the WAN port. There, a DHCP client gets a lease from our cable modem. It then uses dynamic DNS to set a hostname in our domain so I can easily find home from out on the Internet. The other four ports are bridged together, with one of them being a bridge tap port (in case that is ever needed again). It is a caching DNS and NTP server for the inside network as well as providing DHCP service. It also does the NAT and is the endpoint for an IPv6 tunnel from Tunnelbroker, and advertises that prefix to the LAN. It is configured to give priority to the two VoIP devices we have, so they get first crack at the bandwidth. It's also an L2TP VPN server, so we can get in from the outside, if necessary.

One box. About $100. And no having to shoehorn in third party firmware.

Conan's surround mix

We've got a season pass to Conan, and I can't help but complain about the surround mix. There's way too much in the surround channels. It sounds like more of the show is happening behind you than in front.

It's particularly bad during the opening theme music. Andy's introductions are almost completely inaudible.

Now, I'm really, really, sure our system is set up right. And no other shows sound bad like this. We don't really watch anything else on TBS, so I'm not sure whether it's just Conan or everything on TBS. But it is messed the hell up.

But, of course, Conan's website doesn't have any contact information, and neither does TBS's. I could, I suppose, tweet to Conan about it, if I had ever bothered to sign up for twitter. So instead, since I have nobody better to complain to, I'll just whine to all of you. :)

AT&T hates their customers

AT&T is a case study in how not to treat your customers.

AT&T has made it abundantly clear that they don't care at all. The latest proof of this comes from this thread in AT&T's customer forums.

To recap, a paying customer posts a complaint about their service, and an AT&T employee replies telling them to return their phone and go away.

Mark my words, it's this kind of attitude that is going to be why AT&T is going to be transformed from a large company into a small one.

A skeptical look at Unstoppable

Railroads hold an almost universal curiosity for most folks. Probably because of the fact that they're both familiar and somewhat mysterious. Most of us have been on a train of one sort or another, but almost no one knows how to work one. You might say that's the same for airplanes, yet there are half a million (or so) licensed pilots in the U.S. There aren't even 100,000 locomotive engineers. Anyone can own a share of a plane and there are lots of small aircraft fields. But trains run on tracks, and almost nobody owns their own railroad tracks (and almost none of that truly privately owned track is standard gauge).

Because railroading is such a close-knit fraternity, there is relatively little documentation out where the rest of us can read it about how you drive a train.

I have done a little bit more research than the average joe on trains because of my CalTrain commute and I'm curious. I know at least a little bit about the signaling aspects and a little bit about mechanically how a modern diesel-electric locomotive operates. So I was super excited about seeing Unstoppable. And I liked the movie quite a bit. However, there were a few moments in the movie where I couldn't completely suppress the suspension of disbelief.

1. The police were shooting at a fuel cut-off switch. Ok, if such a switch existed, why didn't the hostler who lost control of the train just hit it when he realized the train was going to get away from him? This one is arguably defendable - the guy, after all, was not depicted as being a bright guy. You could say that he didn't think of it. But wouldn't it have been easier for them to try taking a long stick and poking at that switch from the truck while they were driving along side rather than trying to jump onto the ladder?

2. Why didn't the cops shoot the fuel tank full of holes and spill the fuel? Diesel fuel doesn't catch on fire when you shoot it. The mythbusters have been over that time and time again. Certainly dealing with the diesel spill would have been far better than the possibility of having to deal with the spilled phenol (or whatever the McGuffin chemical was).

3. Why were they trying to lower an engineer from a helicopter? Why didn't they just put a second guy on the locomotive that they got in front of the train and have him hop on from there?

4. I may be wrong about this, but I always thought air brakes were fail-safe. That is, the lack of air pressure makes the brakes close. If that were true, then the hostlers would not have been able to move the train at all without having all of the brake lines connected. It would take air pressure from the locomotive to open the brakes to let the train move. Someone who knows trains more than me should chime in on this one.

5. There's just no way that the attempted derailment they set up should have failed. If a portable de-railer had any chance of not working, then they could have just put a couple of sticks of dynamite under a rail and blown it up. It's not as if a derailment wasn't going to screw up that section of track anyway.

6. The hostler wouldn't have put the generator into notch 6. The notches are like gears in a car. What they do is connect up the windings of the generator being driven by the diesel motor in various combinations of series and parallel modes. This allows the generator to either generate high voltage and low current or vice versa for feeding into the traction motors (the electric motors that drive the driven axels). Higher notches generally mean higher speeds. The hostler was moving the train at basically walking speed. He'd have not been able to do his job any better by throwing it into "high gear" any more than that would have been a good move for a car with a stick shift.

7. The movie was, indeed, based loosely on a real-life incident that took place in Ohio. The so-called "Crazy Eights" train (CSX locomotive number 8888) was being moved in the yard and the hostler jumped out of the cab to realign a switch and failed to reboard. In that incident, the airbrakes not being connected was a normal yard procedure, and the hostler set the throttle to 100% believing the engine was configured for dynamic braking (in dynamic braking, the traction motors are converted into generators, and the energy they produce is dissipated in a large bank of air-cooled resistors as waste heat), which translates to full braking power. Instead, the engine was configured normally and full power was applied. He set the independent brake for the locomotive, but it was unable to overcome the engine and the train sped up. CSX was able to stop the train using the same technique that was successful in the film (without quite so much drama, of course). They also had a locomotive ahead of the runaway that they planned to place in front of the train to slow it further, but this was not necessary.

8. Applying the brakes at the end of a powered train poses a risk of "stringlining" if the train goes around a curve. To illustrate what stringlining means, imagine a piece of string sitting on a table. Now form that string into an arc (as if it were a train going around a curve). Now put your finger down on one end of the string, and pull the other forward along the tangent line. The string will deform the curve and eventually become a straight line. Tension in a train consist caused by either tail-braking or head-thrust while going around a curve will tend to cause the cars to want to pull to the inside of the curve - basically in concordance to the centripetal force required to turn the train. I believe this, in fact, was what Frank was up to by working the brakes of the trailing locomotive the way they did while the train was on the elevated curve in the film.

9. Why did it take them so long to try that truck trick to get someone into the cab (or, as mentioned above, to hit the fuel shutoff switch from outside)?

The only other complaint I might have about the film is actually a fairly common one for movies - a lot of technical dialogue that you see taking place between experts on film is often implausible because experts talking amongst themselves assume similar levels of technical expertise, and so leave out a lot of common knowledge. You can't really do that in a film, though, because the audience won't understand, so you have experts talking to each other using the sort of language they'd use to explain stuff to outsiders who don't have that common expertise. Particularly over the radio in crisis situations. It happens all the time in all sorts of genres, from trains to submarines, to airplanes, to computers... I don't envy the challenge that such situations pose to script writers, but it always sticks out like a sore thumb to me.

The latest Microsoft outrage

I am not a big fan of Microsoft. But I had been hearing relatively good things about Windows 7. I don't have a lot of use for Windows myself, but I do have a need on occasion to support others, so I figured it would be a good idea to upgrade my Fusion VM from XP to Windows 7, if for no other reason than to get some experience and learn where all the knobs moved.

So after checking the box very, very carefully to insure it was, I bought the box that included the Windows 7 Home Premium upgrade.

It is absolutely legitimate to upgrade from XP to 7.

While I was at it, I wanted to switch from 32 bit to 64 bit mode. The only way to do that is with a clean install.

Well, that's fine. When my Dad upgraded to Vista, his disk was unbootable, so we did a clean installation of Vista and called up the activation center and they engaged a special workaround that finessed it.

So a few days in, now, and Windows pops up the activation dialog. I put in the key in the box, and it complains that it's an upgrade key. So I call up Microsoft and they tell me to pound sand - that the only recourse is to reinstall XP and then install Windows 7 on top of that.

So, in short, once again, Microsoft takes something really, really simple, and makes it impossible, in a way that benefits absolutely nobody.

ZFS and Cyrus

ZFS allows you to take snapshots of live filesystems, which is a great way to solve the 'oops, I deleted the wrong file' backup problem. 'zfs send' for snapshots allows you to effectively deal with the disaster recovery problem. Snapshots are smart in that they only make copies of new or modified files.

Where this breaks down, unfortunately, is things like databases, where relatively large files wind up being treated as modified and copied into each snapshot. It's much better to use the database's own tools to generate backups, which tend to be much smaller. They also are safer, as a snapshot of a running database may wind up not being cleanly recoverable (obviously they're supposed to be, if the database is fully ACID compliant, but there is always a difference between theory and practice).

Fortunately, zfs makes it cheap and easy to create separate filesystems for data that has different needs.

Cyrus IMAP, unfortunately, by default mixes two different flows of data together - each mailbox directory has one message per file, plus a handfull of opaque database files that are always changing as the content of the mailbox changes. What's more, these database files are entirely reconstructible, so backing them up is unnecessary.

The problem is that you want to snapshot the filesystem where the partition is, but the snapshot will also backup these index files, which is a pointless waste of space.

Fortunately, Cyrus 2.4 has added the ability to separate the meta-data from the partition. This way you can create snapshots of just the mail itself. The snapshots will wind up being much smaller, as a single message will only be present on the disk once (because with cyrus, once a message is written to disk, it's not touched after that).

Before I began, the imapd.conf file had in it:

partition-default: /home/imap-spool

I added to that

metapartition-default: /home/imap-meta

metapartition_files: header index cache expunge squat lock

I created a new zfs filesystem for /home/imap-meta, and chown'd and chmod'd it to match imap-spool. I then shut down the cyrus system.

At this point, there are two choices to migrate. I chose the safer path, which was to simply run 'reconstruct' and then 'find imap-spool -name cyrus\* -delete'. Unfortunately, this resulted in all of the messages being marked as unseen.

The other possible choice would have been to replicate the directory structure under imap-spool to imap-meta, and then move all of the files that don't match the pattern [0-9]*\. from imap-spool to imap-meta.

With either of these paths taken, you should be able to restart Cyrus and see that everything is basically unchanged and still works.

But having done this, you don't have to set up imap-meta for snapshots or backup.

HD, FTW

A few years ago (maybe it was in 2001. I don't remember), 2001: A Space Odyssey had a brief nationwide theatrical run. This was my first opportunity to see a movie that was made to be shown in a theater before I was born on a big screen, as it was intended. I had, of course, seen the film before, but always on Television, which until only recently meant NTSC video. Seeing it in the theater was a tremendous revelation. There was just an amazing amount of detail in the original film that I had never seen in all of the times I had seen the film on TV. The most striking example of this is in the scene when the lunar lander was being lowered into the moonbase. On either side of the elevator there are numerous windows, none of which were truly distinctly discernible on TV. There were actors walking around doing stuff and video screens displaying changing information while the lander was descending, all of which lent an extra air of reality to the scene. No doubt Stanley Kubrick went to a lot of extra trouble to add that in, knowing that people were going to be able to see it and that it would make the scene look just that much more realistic.

All that was nice and all, but I had my doubts that even HD would be able to present as much detail as that.

Turns out, I was wrong.

Just on a whim I decided to watch 2001 via Netflix Watch Now on the TiVo. Our Internet connection is good enough that we pretty routinely now get the highest quality streams available.

The stream they're showing now is every bit as nice as what I saw in the theater that day. All those details are clearly visible on our 50" TV from 8 feet away.

In hindsight, it should have been obvious to me. All you need to do is watch a little bit of an NFL game in SD and then HD to see the difference. It's not subtle. Not even a little.

Cisco Ūmi - say what?

Let's just call it what it is. The Cisco Ūmi is FaceTIme for your living room. As such, it's a pretty cool idea.

Cisco wants you to pony up $600 and $25/mo for the privilege.

Are they nucking futs?

For the same amount of money you literally could buy a mac mini and a webcam and plug that in your TV. You could then download Apple's FaceTime software for free and chat with your similarly equipped friends with no monthly cost at all (besides your Internet connection, which you'd have to pay for with Ūmi anyway).

I may have been born on a Saturday, but it wasn't last Saturday.

Verizon iPhone

Welcome, Verizon.

It'll be interesting to see how many people jump ship from AT&T and how many people trade in various other Verizon phones for iPhones.

At the moment, AT&T and Verizon offer a Morton's Fork to the phone connoisseur: AT&T's network is fast, when it works properly, but has lots of holes, even around here (AT&T is notoriously bad in Palo Alto, for instance). Verizon's network may have somewhat better coverage, but it's as slow as EDGE for data.

Maybe it'll be better with LTE, but of course, the Verizon iPhone isn't going to do LTE (which is only fair - the first iPhone was EDGE). We'll have to wait for that for probably at least another year.

The big news is the word that the Verizon phone will include a WiFi hotspot feature. It'll be interesting to see whether AT&T will add this feature, and how they'll price it (it really should be added for free to their existing tethering feature).

What has been left unsaid so far is whether or not Facetime will be supported without a WiFi connection (that is, over CDMA data). There's a much better case to be made for restricting it on CDMA given the constricted bandwidth compared to HSUPA.

My prediction is that Verizon will offer Facetime without restriction, which will force/shame AT&T into dropping the restriction on Facetime, and AT&T will follow suit with the wifi hotspot for folks who have the tethering plan.

No more POTS lines

I am about to cross a generational rubicon.

I am, sometime in the next week or two, going to call up AT&T and cancel our last remaining POTS line.

This line was "under" our DSL connection, and I had it on the cheapest measured-rate service I could get, because at the time you couldn't get Naked DSL. And, at the time, we had DirecTV receivers that required a connection to a land-based phone line, and we had our alarm system and we used the number to receive faxes.

Well, within a space of about 2 months, I've managed to make all of those justifications vanish. We tossed DirecTV and bought a TiVo Premiere and Comcast cablecards; we replaced our DSL connection by moving the server off into the cloud and buying a cable modem; I've equipped the alarm with a GSM modem and an AT&T prepaid SIM card; and the fax receive capability broke when I shut the server down, and wasn't really being used for anything anyway.

So now the only RJ-11 wiring in the entire house runs between the Vonage box, the cordless phone base, and our printer (for fax sending). Everything else we do is either via cell phones or IP.

How different it was 15 years ago. In 1995 I had a dialup ISP in my home with dialup PPP connectivity to the Internet that cost 4 times what I pay now for 50/10 megabit service. I subsidized the cost of the Internet connection with the ISP business. I had, at the height of it, 5 dialup modems and a couple dozen users. From 6 copper phone lines, down to 0.

Mac App store first impressions

I've perused the Mac App Store. There are some nice apps in there, but I have to say that just based on the value to me being offered, almost every single paid app I've seen so far has been a minimum of double the price I'd be willing to pay for that app. I'd be happy to pay $10 for Daisy Disk, but not $20. Maybe $15 (more like $10) for Earthdesk, but not $25. The one exception is the Contact Cleaner and Calendar Cleaner apps. I don't know if they're any good or not, because my calendar and contacts are clean enough for me at the moment, but if, for example, I had my Mother's calendar and contacts, it'd for sure be worth $5 to fix them.

We'll see if the market as a whole shares my view. Early indications are that at least some developers who got in on the ground floor are ecstatic about first day sales, but I do suspect that, as with the iPod/Pad/Phone app store that preceded it, prices will plummet as we see a race for the bottom.

iPhone and IPv6

I've been a devotee of IPv6 for years now. I bought, and continue to use, an AirPort Extreme because of it's support for 6to4 and tunneling.

Long story short, I've discovered that when an iPhone with IOS 4.x is connected to a WiFi network that's got an IPv6 router serving a globally reachable prefix, it will, in fact, use it!

Here's proof: The Dancing Kame on an iPhone.



This page has logic on it to detect whether or not you are fetching it with IPv6 or not, and though you can't see the animation in the screenshot above, the text surrounding it is different than what you get over IPv4.

So, Apple.... what's stopping you from at least optionally supporting 6to4 over 3G?

BSD in the cloud

For almost 20 years now, I've had static IP addressing at home. It makes me a bit of a throwback to when the Internet was young and September only had 30 days.

I had a static address because I had a server, and servers generally need to have their addresses be well known and stable. Yes, there are dynamic DNS tricks you can use to make do, but they demand that you at least have a stable address for your DNS server, and I've never really been comfortable with the proposition.

So for a while I've had the very best DSL that PacBell/SBC/AT&T would offer, because they also offered static IP addresses for residential service. Comcast, alas, does not. And it sort of makes some sense that they wouldn't. Cable modems are optimized for relatively light upstream demands. And their terms of service discourage the sorts of uses that imply it. Comcast does offer business class services, and they do include static addresses, but that means having a separate business account for service, and they don't actually offer the fastest speeds like they do for their residential customers, and you can't take advantage of bundle pricing and on and on.

I considered getting Comcast and keeping the DSL just for the server, but that winds up being expensive, and the tiny uplink channel for the DSL complicates things like backups.

With all of the advancement in virtualization technologies, however, I decided it was finally time to set up a VPS node and retire the machine in the garage.

I decided to go with RootBSD. They support FreeBSD, and had a reasonably good setup to let you perform your own installation. This let me perform a rather advanced ZFS based configuration that is not actually supported by the current FreeBSD installer. They went the extra mile and connected up the FreeBSD installation/Live DVD image on the virtual optical drive, though normally they install via PXE booting and installing the packages via FTP.

I made a couple of missteps in my attempt at installing, but worked around it by NFS exporting my own live CD across the Internet to fix my errors and everything was fine.

If you're wondering at this point how you get to the console of the virtual machine, they provide you with a VNC based console that you can connect to. The result is no different than if you were seated in front of a physical machine. You also get a web based power switch and reset button. They set your machine up with the amount of RAM and hard disk space you're paying for and they give you graphs so you can see how much network and disk I/O and CPU your VM is using over time. If you decide to upgrade, they can attach more RAM to your VM with just a reboot, and can add extra disk space as additional disk devices.

If you have multiple machines, another feature they offer is a 2nd (virtual, of course) Ethernet interface that connects to a private network connecting all of the machines to each other, and to a SAN where they host backup storage space. Bandwidth used on this private network between your machines (and your machines and the SAN) don't count towards your monthly allowed bandwidth.

All in all, 24 hours in, it's working well. I am using ZFS snapshots for most of the backup needs, and downloading a weekly snapshot as a disaster recovery mechanism. I'll probably retain the physical hardware for a while, just in case, and should be able to recover from a disaster by using the downloaded snapshots. With the Comcast 50/10 service, the weekly backup only takes a couple hours (in the wee hours of the morning).

So far, so good.

How the TSA kills americans

There's a big to-do this week with a big passenger backlash to the perceived excesses of airport passenger screenings. There are those with luddite attitudes towards the new backscatter X-ray scanners, but it's fairly easy to see how the machines themselves are safe. But facing the Hobson's choice of either a virtual strip-search or a pat-down not dissimilar to what happens when suspected criminals are arrested just because you choose to use an airplane to exercise your constitutional right to free (as in speech) travel is unreasonable.

But we can go a step further. There is a web campaign calling on travelers to "opt-out" of the X-ray, forcing the TSA to give all of those passengers pat-downs instead, in an act of civil disobedience. And the TSA has vowed not to give in. And so, the prospect looms of air travel becoming, at least for a day, even more unpleasant.

The more air travel becomes more expensive, unpleasant or otherwise untenable, the more people forego it for their cars. And while individually they don't make headlines, people die on a daily basis on America's roads, to the tune of more than 30,000 per year (as of 2009). That compares to a fatality rate for domestic commercial aviation of approximately 100 per year. So the TSA is doing everything they can to funnel people to a transportation system that has a fatality rate 300 times higher. They should be proud of themselves.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were only possible because of the "rules of engagement" that were in place at the time. Those rules said that passengers and flight crew should cooperate with hijackers and let them go where they wanted and let the police handle matters when the plane lands (as it inevitably must). When Al Queda demonstrated that aircraft could be turned into weapons, those rules changed. In actual fact, Al Queda's plan stopped working even before it was complete - the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania did so because the passengers revolted when they figured out what the plan was. No terrorist since then has been able to take control of or destroy an aircraft while on board because of the vigilance of the passengers.

Really, the only thing the TSA needs to do, given this state of affairs, to make air travel sufficiently safe, is to insure that the cockpits remain secure during flight, that each piece of luggage in the cargo hold belongs to a passenger, and perform the level of passenger screening that was commonplace for the 3 decades between DB Cooper and 9/11.